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<title>at home in fairy-land by on_clockwork_wings</title>
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<h1><a href="https://archiveofourown.org/works/23523604">at home in fairy-land</a> by <a class='authorlink' href='https://archiveofourown.org/users/on_clockwork_wings/pseuds/on_clockwork_wings'>on_clockwork_wings</a></h1>

<table class="full">

<tr><td><b>Category:</b></td><td>Oz - L. Frank Baum, The Wizard of Oz &amp; Related Fandoms</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Genre:</b></td><td>Canon Compliant, Character Study, Female Friendship, Gen, Introspection, One Shot, Ozma is here too but not a focus in the story, POV Female Character, Short, Wordcount: 100-1.000, Wordcount: 500-1.000, as far as is possible with these books!</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Language:</b></td><td>English</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Status:</b></td><td>Completed</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Published:</b></td><td>2020-04-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Updated:</b></td><td>2020-04-07</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Packaged:</b></td><td>2021-05-20 05:42:40</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Rating:</b></td><td>General Audiences</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Warnings:</b></td><td>No Archive Warnings Apply</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Chapters:</b></td><td>1</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Words:</b></td><td>667</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Publisher:</b></td><td>archiveofourown.org</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Story URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/works/23523604</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Author URL:</b></td><td>https://archiveofourown.org/users/on_clockwork_wings/pseuds/on_clockwork_wings</td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Summary:</b></td><td><div class="userstuff">
              <p>Set sometime after the Emerald City of Oz. Dorothy reflects on her feelings about Kansas now that she lives in Oz.</p>
<p>
  <i>Kansas had the house that she grew up in, and it had the little town she visited once a week, but the thing that had made it home wasn’t any of that.</i>
</p>
            </div></td></tr>

<tr><td><b>Kudos:</b></td><td>7</td></tr>

</table>

<a name="section0001"><h2>at home in fairy-land</h2></a>
<div class="story"><div class="userstuff module">
    
    <p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Dorothy doesn’t miss Kansas.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Her friends ask her sometimes, when one of them is feeling particularly maudlin or sentimental and they are all gathered together in their rooms, whether there’s anything she misses about her life there, but she never has as much to say as any of the rest of them. It’s a little puzzling, in all honesty, considering Kansas is where she lived before coming to Oz for good. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Betsy never really had much in the outside world, and Trot sometimes wishes that maybe she had been closer to her mother (and perhaps her father, though he’d hardly been around, off at sea most of the year) and occasionally misses the California coast where she grew up. Dorothy mentions she went to California to visit her cousin, once, but her stay was quickly interrupted by an earthquake that sent her tumbling back into fairy land. She wonders in a distant sort of way what it had been like for Trot to have lived there.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Ozma listens to all this from where she sits leaning against Dorothy, and although she is attentive it is clear she is somewhat bemused as the only one of them who has never lived outside of Oz. Trot goes on to explain how she got her first taste of magic, there on the coast, meeting the mermaids who lived beneath the waves. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>And it only lasts a moment, but Dorothy is struck by the fact that all the wonder in her life took place somewhere else.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Kansas - it’s a bit like a dream, one that’s she already woken up and half forgotten. She remembers it, but only in the way she remembers any experience that’s more emotion than memory. The farm, and the little farmhouse that had had to be rebuilt, and all the apple trees and the fields where she can’t remember what was planted and what was grown but that she does remember once running through.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Dorothy was never lonely. She couldn’t have been lonely when she had Aunt Em and Uncle Henry and, of course, dear Toto - but all those people are here with her now, aren’t they? And now she has the girls - Betsy, and Trot, and sometimes Polychrome when her father sends down a rainbow so she may visit - and she has Ozma, the dearest of her friends, and she has Scarecrow and Nick and the Cowardly Lion, the oldest of them, and she has their friends too. </span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>She knows so many people now, Dorothy thinks, that she couldn’t name half of them in one day! And before, just think of it, she could count them on just a few fingers.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>Lots of things have changed since then. She’s a bit older, though she’s decided she’d rather stay young for a while yet, and she’s gone on the sort of adventures that once were only in her story books. Dorothy’s met all sorts of people, too, the sort of people a person couldn’t meet back in Kansas. The Wizard was from Omaha, sure, and that wasn’t too far from where she had lived, but he wasn’t </span>
  <em>
    <span>in</span>
  </em>
  <span> Omaha any more. None of her family was.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>That must be it, Dorothy thought. Kansas was never home because it was Kansas. There was something nice, perhaps, about living in “civilized country” but there’s something </span>
  <em>
    <span>wonderful</span>
  </em>
  <span> about living in fairy land. Kansas had the house that she grew up in, and it had the little town she visited once a week, but the thing that had made it home wasn’t any of that. It had always been something more, and that was no longer </span>
  <em>
    <span>there</span>
  </em>
  <span>, back in Kansas.</span>
</p>
<p> </p>
<p>
  <span>It was home because that was where the people were, where Dorothy’s family lived. And now that they’re all here, in a wonderland where she can always go on adventures and where Aunt Em and Uncle Henry and all her friends are, too, she rather thinks that if she once again had the silver slippers she’d find herself already home again.</span>
</p>
<p>
  <br/>
  <br/>
</p>
  </div><div class="fff_chapter_notes fff_foot_notes"><b>Author's Note:</b><blockquote class="userstuff"><p>I'm surprised that I wrote this, too, but I think I was in a mood for this today, even if this fandom is practically nonexistent here. I wish I was better at writing longer fics, but I don't think I could have reasonably extended this... Maybe I'll add a bit about Trot, though. </p>
<p>If you have any comments or criticism (or Oz based fic recs), I'd love to hear from you!</p></blockquote></div></div>
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